1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to contact management systems and, more particularly, to schemas for managing contact information.
2. Background and Relevant Art
A contact management system is generally referred to in this application as a system, directory or database that contains contact information about people, groups, organizations, or any other identifiable entity, each of which is referred to herein as a contact. The term “contact information,” as used herein, generally refers to any information that corresponds to a contact and that may be considered relevant for contacting, accessing, corresponding or communicating with the contact.
In the context of the present application, contact information is used by an application to perform a desired function, such as, for example, sending an email, initiating a telephone call, accessing a website, initiating a gaming session, performing a financial transaction, and so forth. Non-limiting examples of contact information include names, e-addresses, physical addresses, and personal information. Examples of names include professional names, personal names, titles, and phonetic names. Examples of e-addresses include email addresses, instant messaging addresses, network addresses, and telephone numbers. Examples of location or physical addresses include home addresses, work addresses, and postal addresses. Examples of personal information include gender designations, birth dates and names.
Contact management systems are extensively used in the computer industry to store and display contact information that is pertinent to the corresponding software applications to which they belong. For example, email applications typically include directories for storing and displaying the email addresses of contacts that can be emailed. Money management applications typically include directories for storing contact information about related financial contacts, such as, for example, banks, accounting service organizations, financial planning organizations, and so forth. Other examples of software applications that utilize contact management systems include time management applications, instant messaging applications, network gaming applications, business directory applications, telephony applications, and so forth.
Contact management systems are also widely used in many hardware devices that are not considered traditional computers. For example, many telephones, facsimile devices, and photocopying devices also include contact management systems for storing contact information that may be used to perform a desired function such as initiating a telephone call, a facsimile transmission, or a telecopy transmission.
One problem encountered by existing contact management systems, however, is that the large variety of specialized and disparate contact management systems and contact directories can make it difficult for a user to quickly access all available contact information for the various applications at the same time. This can be a problem, for example, when a user desires to identify all available means for making contact with a given entity because it may require the user to separately access various directories from many different contact management systems in order to obtain the desired contact information. For example, it may be necessary to access a telephone directory to obtain the home or cell telephone number for the contact, an email directory to obtain a primary email address for the contact, a business directory to obtain the business telephone number, and business email address of the entity, and so forth.
Having disparate contact management systems can also be a problem for obtaining different types of contact information about different contacts. For example, it may be desirable to view the email address of a first contact, the business telephone number of a second contact, and the cell telephone number of a third contact. If the desired contact data for each of the different entities is located in a different contact management system of different applications, then each application will have to be accessed to obtain the desired information, thereby requiring the undesirable expenditure of time and resources. This can particularly be a problem when the contact information is stored by different systems requiring different permission requirements before access will be granted because the user then has to remember the various permission requirements, in addition to going through the motion of logging into the various systems.
Searches and queries for specific contacts or contact information must also be performed separately on each of the various contact management systems. This can particularly be a problem when a user has forgotten in which of the contact management system directories the contact information is stored.
To overcome some of these problems, some contact management systems are configured to store more contact information than is required for the corresponding application. For example, an email directory may be configured to store the addresses, phone numbers and other information about the various contacts stored therein. However, it is somewhat undesirable to duplicatively enter every piece of contact information about every contact into every utilized contact management system. This redundant storage would also represent undesirable and unnecessary expenditure of resources.
Yet another problem with existing contact management systems is that because they are so specialized (e.g., designed to obtain specific contact information related to a specific application) they are not designed to identify relationships that exist between people, groups and organizations. This also inherently limits the scope and scalability of existing contact management systems to provide extensive and rich querying of the contact information.